Carlos Cruz was paying $1,550 per month to live in a 750-square-foot garage-studio without insulation in Santa Cruz while earning a salary of $18,000 per year as a graduate student teaching assistant at University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). He was barely scraping by and was going into debt. Accordingly, in November, he became involved in the burgeoning Cost of Living Adjustment campaign on the UCSC campus.
Cruz, an outspoken first-generation Chicano Ph.D. student in the History Department, is now the only graduate student out of thousands of participants in the Cost of Living Adjustment campaign facing a suspension from the university. The university and police reports treat him as a “ring leader,” Cruz tells Truthout, “as if the people don’t have autonomy. As if the people are just waiting for a person to tell them what to do.”